Re: Gtk version getting closer

[David Masterson <dmaster@synopsys.com>]

>>>>> Jan D writes:

> onsdagen den 13 november 2002 kl 18.09 skrev David Masterson:

>>>>>>> Karl Eichwalder writes:

>>> Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>>>> Could you explain what is disturbing about it?  Then I can think
>>>> about the issue.

>>> Tooltips are popping up and hiding other info.  As somebody else
>>> explained, for menu entries tooltips are not that important,
>>> because menu texts are better to understand than tool bar icons.

>> If tooltips are active, they tend to pop up on their own.  This can
>> be disconcerting for menus, but perhaps that's because I'm slightly
>> more used to the MS-Windows approach.  In that case, tooltips for
>> menus only popup if you use the "What's this?" command (Shift-F1).
>> This "What's this?" command can be applied to any widget on the
>> screen (but not every widget answers it).

>> Perhaps you want to think about this approach for menu tooltips?

> This sounds good.  As pointed out, C-h k is (almost) Emacs version
> of "What's this?".  Could C-h k be bent to show a tooltip when
> invoked on a menu or toolbar item?

> How does MS Windows handle the menu when doing this?  Do you first
> select "What's this?" and then the menu item?  Or is it the menu
> item first and "What's this?" afterwards?  If the first, is the menu
> still open when the tooltip is shown?

You first select "What's this?" if it's available (not always provided
and sometimes it's a simple "?" next to the window's minimize button).
Then you select the "leaf" menu item of interest (ie. menus with
submenus don't trigger the "What's this?").  The menu remains open
during and after the tooltip is shown.

I'm not sure that C-h k should be bent to showing tooltips as C-h k on
a menu item already invokes describe-key and having two different
styles of output for it might be confusing.  In general, you want to
make the tooltip simple to get to, but not constantly popping up in
your way.  My suggestion would be to make the first character of the
menubar (or modeline?) a "?" which would serve as this "What's this?"
button (the equivalent Emacs command can be pretty obscure).  Menus
generally aren't available in non-windows mode (correct?) and you
don't need tooltips in non-windows mode (correct?), so, when the menu
goes away, easy access to tooltips would also go away and this would
be reasonable.

Are tooltips reasonably applied to anything other than (the equivalent
of) an XWindow widget (menu item, button, frame, etc.)?

-- 
David Masterson                David DOT Masterson AT synopsys DOT com
Sr. R&D Engineer               Synopsys, Inc.
Software Engineering           Sunnyvale, CA